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Bishop Paul Tighe, a Vatican culture secretary, says they are finding people on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and other all-inclusive, non-denominational digital houses of worship.

Tighe has been in Lisbon for Web Summit, Europe's largest tech conference.

Before he left he told USA Today that "We're used to one direction for communications. We're used to a microphone or a pulpit,"

"In digital media you only gain an audience if you engage with people and listen to their questions and are willing to debate with them."

Much of the Catholic Church's strength is "no longer going to come from Rome but from building up capacity at a local level where we can have a more conversational, participatory form of dialogue," Tighe said.

He said that in general the Vatican views social media as a place to reach people who might not ordinarily "tune in" to its various messages.

But it also wants to avoid shoving those messages down peoples' throats. "We are not trying to sell anything or bombard people or manipulate them," he said.

Tighe, who moved from the Vatican's communications office to its culture beat last year, said about 600 people work in the Vatican's communications department, but only half a dozen are devoted to social media, mostly related to managing Pope Francis' popular Twitter account: @Pontifex. That's going to change.

The church is "realigning" the department to focus more on social media, including using analytics tools that can track the reach of its accounts. The Vatican will explore all the social media platforms to see which will make a good fit, Tighe said.

Currently, the church is receiving advice from Instagram, a visual-heavy platform which he said "works quite well" for the church.

Tighe, (born 1958) has been the Adjunct Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture since his appointment on 19 December 2015.

He is the highest-ranking Irishman in the Roman Curia and was consecrated a bishop on 27 February 2016.

He previously served as secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications from 30 November 2007. Before that he was director of the Office for Public Affairs in the Dublin diocese.

Web Summit ran from Monday to Thursday and was attended by 50,000 people from 165 countries.

About 15,000 companies were represented and 7,000 CEOs and business leaders attended

Source

• usatoday.com
• stuff.co.nz
• en.wikipedia.com
• Image: newsflash.org

The praise was understandable. After the spate of missteps that have come to define Benedict's nearly eight-year papacy, it seemed that the Vatican might finally be able to get a jump on the 24/7 news cycle rather than always playing defense.

But the focus on the pope's personal entry into social media (the Vatican has a general Twitter feed and Facebook page) is really a subplot to a larger, behind-the-scenes effort by the Roman curia to overhaul the Vatican's notoriously byzantine communications apparatus and head off problems that can't be glossed over by even the most appealing papal tweets.

That restructuring began in earnest this year following incessant criticism — many from Vatican allies — that Rome's hapless messaging was accelerating controversies instead of defusing them.

From Benedict's citation of an inflammatory passage on Islam's Prophet Muhammad in a 2006 speech to his rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop in 2009, the pope had become known for creating gaffes rather than preaching the gospel. Behind Vatican walls the frustration was building.

The push for a communications reboot was given fresh urgency last January, following the infamous "Vatileaks" case in which papal valet Paolo Gabriele — who was convicted in October — secretly passed thousands of sensitive internal memos to the Italian media that portrayed the Vatican as a den of poisonous intrigue.

So how is the overhaul going now that things are settling down?

"It's a work in progress," said Greg Burke, the Fox News reporter who the Vatican hired last summer in an unusually high-profile move. "I'm just aiming for baby steps at this point, trying to get things moving in the right direction. And I think they are." Continue reading

Sources

• Huffington Post
• Image: The Independent